Movies this week

Films
Opening: Seraphine (1 week only!), Il Trovatore (Tue, March 9th at 7:00pm)

Continuing: Crazy Heart, Animated Oscar Shorts, The Last Station, Shutter Island, The White Ribbon

Movies and music this week

Continuing:
A Single Man
Broken Embraces
The Young Victoria
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus
Sherlock Holmes
Up in the Air

Music:
Monday: Annie Wells

Wednesday: The Margaret Explosion

Thursday: Deborah Magone

Friday: Don Mancuso & Regi Hendrix

Saturday: Steve Greene Trio

This week's films

Opening Tonight: Up in the Air

Opening Friday: The Young Victoria, Nine, Sherlock Holmes

Continuing: Invictus, A Serious Man

Emerging Filmmakers Series Mon. 28th 9:15pm, tickets $5.00

So many openings this week

We've got a huge slate of openings this week. Because we have so many to cover, I'll be posting more in-depth bits about them all week. We wish you and yours a safe holiday--and we hope to see you at the movies!

Openings:

Dec. 23rd
Up in the Air (Directed by Jason Reitman, Starring George Clooney and Vera Farmiga)

Dec. 25th
Nine (Directed by Rob Marshall, Starring Nicole Kidman, Penelope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, Judi Dench, Daniel Day-Lewis, Fergie and Kate Hudson. Holy cow--all of them in one film?! Screenplay by the late Anthony Minghella and Michael Tolkin)

Sherlock Holmes (Directed by Guy Richie, Starring Robert Downey, Jr., Jude Law and Rachel McAdams)

The Young Victoria (Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée. Starring Emily Blunt, Rupert Friend, Paul Bettany)

Twitter and its box office impact

Once upon a time, word-of-mouth about a film used took days to circulate; now it can happen directly from the movie theater. It used to be when films opened strongly their first day of an opening weekend, they would stay strong all weekend. But now studios are noticing new patterns--upswings or dropoffs (and dramatic ones at that) before the weekend is even over.

More and more people are Twittering opinions as they leave the theater--likewise, they are listening in to Twitter chatter to determine if they will attend a film or not. Generally, people will pay attention to what the people in their network have to say because they have things in common with them.

When "Inglourious Basterds" (which played here) was being marketed, the Weinstein Company went all out to court Twitter users. A couple of examples include: their screening at San Diego's Comic Con was filled with people who won their seats on Twitter, they also conducted the first "Red carpet Twitter meetup" which generated lots of celebrity-level tweets about the experience.

What do you think? Do you pay attention to Twitter input when deciding about movies? Do you like the ways studios are trying to use it as a marketing tool?